A traveling yoga teacher must pay federal authorities almost $5.6 million for her role in an alleged Ponzi scheme out of Plantation that raked in more than $30 million from investors.

Zeina "Zeeluv" Smidi, who tours the country in a bus fueled by vegetable oil, had the multimillion-dollar judgment entered against her in Fort Lauderdale federal court. Smidi and her former fiance, James Clements, once ran a group of companies under the names MRT or Maximum Return Transactions that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged served as fronts for an investment fraud involving foreign currency trading.

Smidi, 31, and Clements, 50, have been accused by SEC lawyers of moving about $3 million of investors' money to their personal bank accounts and using another $3 million for travel, luxury items and other expenses. In one three-week span, money from an MRT account was used to pay for $8,000 in NFL tickets, meals at ski resorts in Vermont and Colorado, and hotel reservations in Las Vegas, bank records show.

Smidi must pay $2.5 million in profits she made, $2.5 million in civil penalties and another $600,000 in interest, U.S. District Judge William Dimitrouleas ordered May 21 in the SEC civil case against her. In a separate judgment, Clements was ordered to pay $768,000 to the SEC.

The attorney for Clements and Smidi said that they have done everything they can to help clients recover their money, and that allegations they used the funds to support an extravagant lifestyle are not true.

"The [SEC] case is resolved," said Inger Garcia, their attorney. "I'd love to comment, but I can't on certain issues."

Clements testified at a June 2008 court hearing that he had "nothing to be ashamed of" and had made no guarantees to clients.

The U.S. Attorney's Office sent letters in March 2010 to Clements and Smidi informing them that they were targets of a criminal investigation. The status of that inquiry was unclear Friday.

That frustrates MRT clients such as Nyra Horowitz, 75, a Boynton Beach widow who lost $140,000 to the company.

"That's what gets me — they still walk the streets," Horowitz said. "In the meantime, I haven't seen one nickel."

Clements and Smidi ran MRT from 2005 until the summer of 2007, first promising investors high returns from foreign currency trading and then saying the company was investing in high-yield overseas products, according to the SEC lawsuit. Less than $3 million was used for currency trading, while old investors were paid with new investors' money, federal authorities said.

Besides the judgments in the SEC case, Clements and Smidi are on the hook for a $50 million judgment entered against them in a class-action lawsuit filed by MRT investors.

Jeffrey Sonn, the attorney who brought the class-action case, said that all by indications Clements headed MRT while Smidi filled a role analogous to a chief operations officer. He said that there have been some small recoveries of investors' money, but the MRT bank accounts had been emptied and there were no visible assets by the time the class-action suit was brought.